Okay, I took a slightly different approach today. After a good 15 minute conversation with a couple of people at my recruiting agency, they're going to start looking for another position that involves coding starting Monday. I told them my concerns and also what I'm best suited for, coding wise. At Microsoft or not, I WILL get what I want.
I see where you're coming from, but let me ask you this. Have you worked in Microsoft Game Studios? I'm in building Studio A, but I can't remember whether this building was strictly for testing or not. I'm quite sure that Studio B has devs there. The testers are quite isolated from the devs and I have yet to meet a tester who has communication with any devs. I know it's not impossible to find a dev, but I don't exactly feel comfortable asking every person I see one by one "Are you a dev? Are you a dev?". There has to be a way of finding someone in the coding department, I just don't know how to do it yet. I'll try asking around and see where the devs normally do their work and in what building/office. Afaik, I'm limited to Studio A as far as access goes.
OK, I've never worked at Microsoft or MGS so I don't know how their structure compares to where I work, but they probably use Outlook for their e-mail system, right? Large companies using Outlook often set up their employee directory in Outlook so that you can search for people by various things - their team, their job title, etc. Depending on whether or not they've entered in interesting information like which team and role the person is in, you may be able to find a lead engineer on a team you might be working with. If I remember correctly, Microsoft's acronym for engineers is 'SDE'. I don't know if MGS's culture is sufficiently different from the main bulk of Microsoft or not.
If you can't find any leads via Outlook, the next thing to try is the company intranet (often just called a Wiki). Chances are that on a big team, the first thing they'll have you do when you start there is read a few pages on how to get your computer set up. Same idea - you've got a big web site full of information and people's e-mail addresses. Find someone that sounds promising and e-mail them. This is a little bit less ideal since many people listed on the wiki might have left the company since they wrote a particular page.
If that doesn't work, use your connections on the job, even if they start out indirectly. Depending on your issue tracking software, you will probably run into a lot of cases where you open an issue, it gets routed to an engineer, and then they eventually route it back to you with something like: Fixed, As Designed, Cannot Reproduce, etc. You should be able to get the name of that engineer from the issue tracking software. Find their e-mail in Outlook or Skype and send them a message outlining your goal of switching over to the engineering department. If they can't help you directly, ask them for other people to contact. If they ignore you, just repeat the process the next time a different engineer routes an issue back to you.
Be on the lookout for company picnics, movie days, volunteering or community service campaigns. These are great chances to meet random people at the company face-to-face and just chat and find out what they do and discuss your goal. I haven't heard of companies that exclude the QA department from these events; that would just be a total dick move on their part. Even if the people you meet at these events aren't engineers themselves, it increases your odds of finding someone who knows someone who knows someone.
Even if all of that goes well, the odds are that in a large company you'll still have to go through essentially the whole interview process again. If the person you're talking to doesn't really have confidence in your abilities, ask them something like "Is there some other way I could prove myself, such as helping the engineering team actually fix bugs IN ADDITION TO my current job in QA?".
Get your foot in the door by any means possible. But also be very diplomatic about it; play it cautiously and avoid annoying people at all costs.
Yes, they do use Outlook for their email systen. The way they have it set up is also quite convenient. An employee's email address is typically the first two letters of your name, followed by the first four letters of your last name @microsoft.com. There's also a prefix (a- or v-) depending on your status as a employee there (and I'll explain more about those in just a moment because it's V-E-R-Y significant especially in my case). Not every alias works based on these rules, so sometimes you have to get their alias directly from someone who knows. If there is a company directory, then I don't know where to find it. We also have a program called Lync, which is the office version of MSN, so to speak. As long as I have someone's alias, I can IM anyone in the company, at any given moment.
Since I'm not a lead tester, I don't get to file bug reports or anything like that, nor do I get to know any of the engineers that work behind the scenes off hand either. In fact, I don't believe any of the testers in my department (not even leads) do themselves. The management hierarchy is rather big here, and I find it hard to navigate though, especially tracing people up the food chain. Unless you're really high up the ladder, your access to certain things is quite limited, even if you're in QA.
As far as company pic-nics, movie events, press conferences, and other events, that's actually a great idea, but my status disqualifies me from attending such things, not because I'm in QA, but because I'm an A- employe. I'm an A- employee, meaning that I'm through a contractor or I'm an independent contractor, and my access to these events is severely limited. Essentially, A- employees are disposable "piss ants". A V- employee is different and more privileged. They are either full time employees, or have special contracts. These employees are allowed to attend anything they have clearance for and access most buildings. Furthermore, aside from the fact that they generally get paid more, they are much less likely to get laid off. A good example of the exclusivity would be the movie event that occured yesterday. All the employees got to go see Star-Trek. We A- employees were not invited. An even better example is the unveiling of the next Xbox event on campus. Only V- employees can attend, and to add insult to injury, A- employees are not allowed anywhere near the event, not even to go get lunch from the commons! Why is this so? It's because somewhere between the late 90s and early 2000s, the contract employees won a major lawsuit against Microsoft for something I wasn't told, and since then, Microsoft chose to reduce the level of liability they have over A- employees. That's just a general description of what happened, and I'm quite sure that the details run much deeper than that somehow. So unless you're a full time employee or have a contract written in gold ink, your access to those events is very limited. I've only been at Microsoft twice, including now. Out of all the events and other stuff of that nature, how many events did I get to partake in? One.
Microsoft ain't all that bad though. I went to their PC-recycling section, and they let me have a handful of their old hardware. My favourite catch was an actual STB Velocity128 (Riva 128). In spite of it's flaws, it was one of the most awesome cards I ever had and I happily keep it on my retro gaming PC. Okay, I'll stop going off topic.
Breaking in here can be done, the guy that sat next to me managed to get his coding skills recognized because he wrote a test tool that the leads were highly interested in. He's not doing coding as part of his job description, but he's not in my department either anymore because they moved him somewhere else (before he wrote that test tool) that's protected by NDA so he can't even tell me. Microsoft doesn't make it easy for us, but like I said, I will get what I want whether it's from Microsoft or not.
Shogun.
